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Anne Lauvergeon: champion of the nuclear option

Robin Pagnamenta

March 8 2010, 12:01am, The Times

She has been ranked by Forbes as one of the world’s ten most powerful women, ahead of Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Queen, but Anne Lauvergeon looks puzzled by the idea. “I don’t really know what that means,” the chief executive of Areva says. “My six-year-old son thinks it means I must have very big muscles.”

In terms of industrial muscle, he is not wrong. Since the creation of Areva in 2001 from a disparate jumble of French state-owned industrial assets, “Atomic Anne” has forged the world’s biggest builder of nuclear reactors, a global powerhouse with more than 75,000 staff and an order book worth more than €43 billion.

One, moreover, that is intent on getting bigger. Globally, the number of reactors is expected…

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